Q: Why did you choose to focus on
Lincoln’s body and his image in your new book?

A: That’s always a hard question to
answer. I was fascinated when I finished my previous book, Jesus in America,
that Lincoln was much less interested in Jesus than most of his peers were. He
had an inquiring, theological mind and spoke often about providence, but
he rarely mentioned Jesus. …When he was assassinated, everyone compared
him to Jesus: he gave his body for us….

Many years ago, I decided I wanted to
write a book called Lincoln’s Body. It would go back to the three to six weeks
after the assassination, investigating how northerners, black and white,
addressed the paradox of a guy who didn’t say much about Jesus but was suddenly
equated to Jesus although [they were aware] he wasn’t divine.

I went quite some time trying to write
a book about April 15 to June 1, [and then with my editor] decided the real
story was only starting on June 1. I was more interested in the meaning people
were giving to Lincoln’s death and his body.

The need to go further was symbolized
by two texts. On June 1, Charles Sumner gave an important [speech saying] the
task has just begun, that the important text is the Gettysburg Address, not the
Second Inaugural. The Second Inaugural was what people took as his last words.
Sumner was saying there’s too much emphasis on the Second Inaugural—“with
malice toward none”—and that the fight has just begun to ensure that all
Americans, black and white, are made citizens….

The second thing is Walt Whitman’s poem
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” that came out in October 1865. The
great lines kept coming back to me, “I mourn’d and yet shall mourn with
ever-returning spring.”…

In his old age he spoke often on
Lincoln on the anniversary of his death. We are responsible for keeping alive not just the memory
of Lincoln but also the mourning. It will allow us to keep Lincoln alive in our
bodies. He got the importance of Lincoln’s body…By dying, [Lincoln] had offered an "eminent" death for the nation.

That launched me on the ultimate quest
for the whole chronology.

Then there was the arrival in 2012 of
[the Lincoln movie]. Daniel Day-Lewis made the body visible to all of us again,
the way northerners and black southerners too, they way the felt the body of
Lincoln in every dimension….

Q: You describe the different
reactions between white Republicans and African-Americans to Lincoln’s death.
What were these reactions and did they persist in the years to come?

A: The basic sweep that I see is white Republicans and
northern and southern blacks all showed love for Lincoln. The Democrats in the
North did too. The only groups who weren’t part of that were Irish Catholics
and a few other groups in the North, and most white southerners. Over the
course of the late 19th century they started coming on board….

White Republicans were divided in 1865. The Radical
Republicans really were almost happy with the removal of Lincoln, they were so
eager to punish the former Confederates, they thought Lincoln was too
forgiving. They wrongly imagined Andrew Johnson was going to [engage in]
punishing treatment of the traitors.

Black northerners and southerners and white Republicans—they
hoped for extending rights to black men. As Lincoln said on April 11, he
recommended that black former slaves, men, be given the vote if they were Union
veterans or had some education. No president had ever said that before. It’s
probably what made John Wilkes Booth decide to attack him on the 14th.

In the late 19th century, white Republicans had
more or less subordinated black citizenship questions to the reunion of whites
in North and South.

I wanted to let black memories of Lincoln be equal to white
memories…black people kept alive [the idea of] Lincoln the Emancipator when
white people forgot. It took 100 years for white people to remember what the
Radical Republicans and black people were saying in
1865: that African Americans were legally equal to whites. Southern blacks lived through the horror story of making progress toward citizenship during Reconstruction, then seeing that progress reversed.

Then you can see the heroism of [Martin Luther] King’s
generation and earlier generations—they kept the idea of Lincoln the liberator
alive….

Q: You write that during the Vietnam and Watergate period,
“Lincoln was bound to languish as a symbol of the nation.” Was this the only
time since Lincoln’s death that this languishing happened?

A: Some historians said that in the late 19th
century [it also happened] and they saw the 1909 centenary as a great revival.
I’m not sure that’s true. There was certainly a blinding light of enthusiasm
about Lincoln in 1909 and leading up to it. In the beginning of the 1900s,
there was enthusiasm for what was to come. Especially if we mainstream black
memories of Lincoln, in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, there was a continuous
remembrance of Lincoln as the true [author] of American ideals—he taught us
that all Americans were created equal….

There was a turning away from Lincoln as a great hero in the
1970s and 1980s, culminating in the Gore Vidal novel Lincoln. [That period] is
unique as I see it. It was the biggest downturn—blacks and whites were finding
a reason to depart from the Lincoln orbit.

The irony is that King so deftly exploited the memory of
Lincoln from 1963-65. Between 1965-68, he took a very different turn. If you
argue for equal rights, Lincoln is great, but for equality of condition, you’re
leaving Lincoln’s orbit....

Q: You describe President Obama’s desire to link himself to
Lincoln. What do you think of this comparison?

A: I feel like the analogy between Lincoln and Obama is very
strong, it’s stronger maybe than even Obama gets. …For me the fact is that for
Obama and Lincoln, the exciting historical story had just happened the
generation before. For Obama, it was the civil rights movement. For Lincoln, it
was the founding of the nation....

Q: You begin the book by stating, “Dead for a century and a
half, Abraham Lincoln remains curiously and uniquely alive to millions of
Americans.” What are the main reasons for that?

A: I was not able to answer that question to my own
satisfaction. It’s a fact that Lincoln just—again, with the assassination—rose
to a place in our nation’s pantheon beyond any other person.

Even in 1865, many people proposed that now there were two
national fathers, Washington and Lincoln, and that Lincoln would eventually outstrip
Washington.

Everyone knew Washington would remain a symbol of the nation, but many believed Lincoln would reach a pinnacle all his own: he was the only one who could have performed this impossible balancing act, not pushing too hard for the end
of slavery but pushing hard enough for it to come about…

Not only was Lincoln assassinated, but, like Kennedy, he was
assassinated and then immediately gone. There was no chance for last words, no
way for us to reconcile ourselves to his death. The suddenness of the
withdrawal marked people in the first generation, and they passed it on to
their kids…

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).